Loot Runs

I was thinking of computer role-playing games in terms of my future paper while I was playing Fallout 3 the other day. The progression curve seems backwards to me. When I talk about "progression" here, I mean it in the sense of the difficulty curve, but that affects story progression too.

Most CRPGs start the players out as level one schlubs. Rats and wild boars are a major cause of death among level one characters. As they defeat these rather modest enemies and advance the story they gain in levels; they get new equipment that adds to their stats. By end game they are a walking engine of destruction, almost invincible save for the end boss or falling asleep at the keyboard. Measuring progression by level is part of the problem.

CRPGs are the descendants of tabletop RPGs and those trace their roots back to Dungeons and Dragons. Early D&D had its own roots in tabletop wargaming. D&D used level based progression, and thus CRPGs use it today. But there are some serious mathematical issues that can come from this scheme. I recall two games of Robotech back when I used to play tabletop games regularly. One gamemaster followed the developer's advice of parcelling out experience points, which are used to determine the player's level, very sparingly. In his game it took six months to a year of regular weekly play to hit the next level. The other gamemaster handed them out like candy on Halloween. His players quickly passed the level that the designers recommended for character retirement (the player character becomes a non-player character used to introduce adventures by the GM) and on to the level cap. Characters in Robotech really weren't designed to be played at that level. A single five player party would take on whole alien armadas - by themselves. This is roughly the equivalent of five soldiers winning World War II. My Fallout 3 game on the PS3 has reached this point. There really aren't any enemies that are a threat to me anymore, and that kills a story dead.

I think there might be a better way of handling progression in computer games. Imagine if we turned this equation upside down. The player begins as a major hero - at the "level cap," they are well skilled and equipped - we can skip killing 1,000 boars for experience. The game designer uses this period of nigh invulnerability to teach the player how the game works. Over time though, the player gets progressively weaker. His stats and skills don't go down, but his equipment starts to wear out, in a modern game ammunition might become scarce. This reverse progression means that enemies don't have to scale upwards as dramatically as they have to using a more conventional progression scheme. Players have to make choices about when they want to use their equipment - they're less likely to pull out the +12 Sword of Awesome or the Man Portable Nuke Cannon against the diseased rat if they know it might not be available against a more threatening monster. I think this system allows more freedom for the writer - players out leveling content is less of a concern.

My Top Five - Bad Films

Sure, top five lists are cliché, consider this an homage to one of my favorite movies of all time, High Fidelity.


Number 5 - Plan 9 from Outer Space

Featuring the writing of Ed Wood, and starring Bela Lugosi (and Mr. Wood's chiropractor playing Lugosi after he died during the filming), Vampira and the massive bulk of Tor Johnson. This film was acclaimed the worst movie of all time by the book The Golden Turkey Awards. Tim Burton, made a film about the making of the movie with a star-studded cast. 

My favorite "actor" in the film is The Amazing Criswell, a talk show psychic who didn't shy away from making precise predictions. In 1968 he predicted the end of the world would occur on August 18, 1999 when all the oxygen would be sucked from the Earth by a black rainbow. Obviously this is absolutely true and all this business about 2012 is a lot of hog wash. You can also listen to May West sing about Criswell here. And you probably should. More Criswell from the intro to Plan 9:

The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!

Number four: The Omega Man - A Remake of The Last Man on Earth

This is a remake of the vastly superior Vincent Price classic, it's pure 70s and pure pain. Essentially a zombie movie, but the zombies aren't slow or mindless - they're an active, cunning opponent. Something that can't be said of Charleton Heston, the movie's lead.

Number Three: Space Hunter, Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

Sadly, I can't find a trailer for this one. You might be able to find quite a bit more than the trailer elsewhere. Hint. Hint. I remember seeing it as a kid, it has to be one of the worst movies of all time and features a young Molly Ringwald as the plucky sidekick. In this 3-D film Peter Strauss plays Wolff the space adventurer who must rescue a trio of shipwrecked super models from the clutches of Overdog.

Overdog, played by Michael Ironside is probably one of the most perplexing and disturbing villains ever played on screen.

Number three: Strays

As tempting as it would be to list the Vin Diesel movie, this isn't it. I'm bending the rules - this one is made-for-tv, but it still counts.

I originally saw this on Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater, and it has to be one of the silliest horror movie plots ever conceived. Written by former Hardy Boy Shaun Cassidy, this movie is the standard American family buys a dream house but there's something wrong. In this case the trouble is a pack of feral house cats. I wish I was kidding. One of the most unintentionally funny movies you'll ever see.

Number two: The Beast

Another made for TV classics, hawked endlessly by the Sci-Fi channel along with its desperately unnecessary sequel. A giant squid terrorizes a small fishing community in the Pacific Northwest. I'm sick of the squid.

And the number one bad film is . . . the envelope please . . . .

Zardoz

This movie was the impetus for this post. A friend of mine mentioned that she has seen this, and quoted the famous line:

Which isn't the sort of thing you normally hear when you're doing your shopping. But I was wrong, I could've sworn that Burt Reynolds was the lead in this movie. It seems like the sort of movie Burt Reynolds should star in. I guess I'd prefer to remember Sean Connery as 007.

Down to business, in this film Sean Connery plays an "exterminator" in the post apocalyptic future. Sworn to the god Zardoz (that'd be the giant floating head that carries on about wangs), a man who kills the underclass known as "brutals." In a way it is Teenage Cave Man meets the 1970s. In time, he discovers the shocking (read: not-all-that-shocking) truth about his civilization and his god.

Really Simple Syndication, Google Reader and Students

Despite the fact that I'm roughing it tonight, I'm just going to soldier on. We need to talk about Really Simple Syndication or RSS. As a student, this is something you need to know about. RSS allows you to know when a website, like this blog has been updated with new content. It's used all over the web from Boing Boing to ZDnet. In order to take advantage of RSS you need to subscribe, either through your browser's RSS feature or through an RSS reader. To do this in a browser you click on the feed symbol.

This is what the RSS symbol looks like in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6.2.

This is the standard broadcast symbol for RSS.

Often, syndicated content will have a link in each post asking you to subscribe as well.

This is what Lifehacker's subscription page looks like when you subscribe in Safari.

This is the RSS screen in Opera 10.

I don't use a browser to read RSS though, I prefer a reader. There are a variety of local readers available for just about any operating system, but my preference is Google Reader.

This is Google Reader. I like it because it can go anywhere you do. It works on your desktop, notebook and many internet connected mobile phones. This can be a real advantage when say, your desktop dies, as mine just did. I didn't lose any of my RSS feeds and everything stays up to date. It's also integrated with Google's new social networking product Buzz - as you can see in this picture. This allows people I follow to share their favorite articles with me, and vice versa. In Reader, you just copy the address you want to view in reader, press the add a subscription button, and paste. Then you can organize it with folders like I have, and it's immediately available for reading.

You can also have persistant Google searches show up in Reader, this is a real benefit for students - you can put in a term that you're writing a research paper on, see the initial search hits and see if new ones turn up each day. It's like having a research assistant right in your browser. It also allows you to see stats, hence why I know that I have three subscribers on this blog, though it doesn't say specifically who they are (I know two of the three subscribers I have personally.) You can see how often each blog you're subscribed to updates, how much of each blog you've read and a variety of other information. If you're into that kind of thing, and I most certainly am.

In addition to using a search engine like Google, Google blogs, or Technorati to find blogs you're interested in, Reader will also suggest blogs based on what you're currently subscribed to. Again, if you're doing research this can be invaluable. Best of all, it's free. I've experimented with a few local (as in on your computer's harddrive) readers, but none has impressed me as much as Google's.

If there is an RSS reader you're using, I'd love to hear about it or maybe you have a question, please let me know in the comments.

Geek Issues: Star Wars, Trilogy vs. Trilogy

In my last post about Star Wars, we talked about what was great in the original trilogy. Now let's look at what I find disappointing about the new trilogy. The answer isn't as simple as "Jar Jar," no matter what arguments I might have put forth in the past. It really comes down to characterization.

I want you to think of the words "The Empire," not even the full and proper name for the bad guys of the original trilogy. It's sharp and evocative. When you think of those words you can see the Death Star, hear the Imperial March, and the clattering armor of a platoon of Stormtroopers. Darth Vader strolling through a fire fight, and his asthmatic breathing, looming over everyone else in his stark, black armor. The whine of a tie fighter as it flies off camera. An Imperial Star Destroyer dwarfing Princess Leia's transport after immobilizing it with a tractor beam. The Empire is monolithic, ubiquitous and a sharp contrast to the Rebel Alliance.

The waters in the prequel trilogy are considerably muddier. We have the Trade Federation, and seriously, who are they? They sound like a rotary group. Not exactly the stuff of nightmare. There's the Sith, who at least after we've seen Darth Maul seem a little more threatening, but you get very little back story. Sidious (Palpatine), Maul, Tyranus (Dooku) are the only Sith who are clearly identified, and none of them are very intimidating save Maul who doesn't last very long.

When we compare these villains to Darth Vader, they come up decidedly short. Vader was the stuff of our worst fears long before Lucas created him. Large and physically menacing, Vader was played by a Swedish wrestler. Sweden seems to have a history in producing science fiction and horror villains, Tor Johnson who was also a Swedish wrestler, was a staple villain in many older films. Vader was clad in black body armor, which provided both a mythic hook to hang the villain on from the countless legends of men in black and dehumanized him, as the armor obscured his features. His asthmatic breathing reminded us that he was a living being, not a mere machine. His evil is clear and unambiguous. He commits both murder and genocide by the time the credits roll in A New Hope. Despite the fact that his origins are purposefully obscured, Vader moves into his role as the principle villain of the original trilogy with little effort.

I understand that the evil presented by the future Emperor Palpatine is purposefully different. He's from the "evil mage" school of villainy. But I feel both trilogies and especially the prequel trilogy fail to present this well compared to more conventional fantasy. His evil in the prequel trilogy is subtle, but as in comic books, subtlety is not a device that works well in fantasy. In fantasy there is typically a very stark contrast between absolute good and evil. In this genre, evil even when it is not strong in the physical sense, must have the appearance of overwhelming strength of some kind - typically it should appear a great deal stronger than the heroes. Palpatine as a character fails in this, both in the final movie of the original trilogy (in which he is killed by Vader, Luke resists temptation and Anakin is redeemed), and in the prequel trilogy. We never see him as powerful, in fact, we usually see him as weak. This is communicated in both trilogies through his frail frame. Granted, he does best two Jedi and feigns weakness as part of his plan to bring Anakin Skywalker to the dark side, but overall he seems to be a one trick pony. Force lightning, Force lightning and failing that, yet more Force lightning.

We could compare heroes and see many of the same weaknesses. In fantasy however, villains tend to be more emblematic than the heroes. For instance, in Lord of the Rings, Sauron or even the One Ring itself is more representative of the story than any of the heroes. But I believe that the heroes in the original trilogy are stronger than the prequel in any case.

I believe almost anything Lucas had followed the original trilogy with would have disappointed. Similar to Joseph Heller spending his whole writing career living in the shadow of his most famous work, Lucas was too successful with the original trilogy and there was too much time between it and the prequel trilogy. By the time The Phantom Menace was released, the original trilogy was part of my generation's childhood, and changing anything in regards to those memories is to wander into dangerous territory.

The Dizzying Heights of Celebrity?

I want to apologize, my posting has been a little irregular recently. I'm currently trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of my two express classes which are ending. I wanted to celebrate a gala moment for this blog though. As of last night, my subscription numbers have tripled! That's right! I have three subscribers. Of course, that really isn't important on a student blog - this is the place I practice writing for my Composition Two (Electric Boogaloo?) class. But subscriber number three, you are welcome here!

I have to admit that it went to my head a bit when I found out. First, I enjoyed an exotic alcoholic beverage . . . from Milwaukee. Then I attended a movie premier . . . at my neighbors house. I made him roll out the red carpet and shoot pictures of me entering his living room with his digital camera. We watched the camcorder footage from his vacation last year. There was pop-corn. It was fun. When it was time to go home, I was driven by a chauffer . . . my neighbor's son, in the cargo area of his little red wagon. I tipped him a fiver and returned to my customary seat in front of the iMac.

I may have gotten a little out of control, but I promise to use my newfound power wisely. You won't see me dancing without pants in a Hollywood discotheque. I promise not to run around with strange women. That's going to be an easy promise to keep, because women strange or otherwise seem to have enough sense to avoid running around with me. I won't cheat on my taxes, lie to Congress, or ship arms to the developing world. I won't publicly discuss my blog's subscription numbers or talk about Fight Club.

Oops. Cut me some slack, I'm new at this.

Sometime after Wednesday, I hope to finish up my series on Star Wars, talk a little about RSS readers, and maybe we'll have some cake. See you then, Buckaroos.

Chris Demmons, New Media Mongrel? Maybe I ought to be a "New Media Mongol?" That sounds exciting.

Let me know what you think.

Geek Issues: Star Wars, The Holy Trinity

I want to talk about the fundamental issues for geeks, at least for geeks who include# science fiction and fantasy. Most of us have some intense feelings about Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Star Trek. In my neck of the woods, discussions about Star Wars have a tendency to turn ugly. I saw this article on CNET recently about a documentary about Lucas work on the Star Wars series, The People vs. George Lucas. You can see the film's website here and the first teaser trailer here on Youtube.

I saw Star Wars the year it was released with my parents. I was two or three years old. It changed my life forever. It was one of the last things I remember that we did as a family. My parents separated the next year and eventually divorced. This film was a part of my story well before I was rolling d20s or reading Asimov. I saw it many times that year, and it was my constant companion throughout my childhood.

I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as they were released in the theater. Like Star Wars IV A New Hope, I saw these films over and over. They just never got old. I had the actions figures, the X-Wing, a Tie Fighter, the Milenium Falcon and the Death Star play set. I even had the action figure case shaped like Darth Vader's head, which was probably a bad idea. Darth Vader gave me nightmares. Later I ran campaigns in the Star Wars role playing game that West End Games published. I still have the oversized Star Wars comic book that I got not long after seeing the movie.

I don't think George Lucas "raped" my childhood. Far from it. I owe Mr. Lucas a great debt and thank him for the things he created that changed my life. In my next post I want to compare the original trilogy and the prequels. I hope you'll join me.

Social Bookmarks and You

One of the things I'm looking at this term is how to make life easier for students. I've known about social bookmarking services like delicious.com, digg and stumbleupon for a while now but I'd never really taken the time to investigate them. Probably because I didn't have a need. I usually have at the very least my Macbook available to me when I'm on the road, but a few times this term I've been stuck without it and had all my very important (ha!) research on my browser here at home.

I started out using XMarks, which has elements on the client (your browser) and their server. I like the fact that they aren't married to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Apple. Unfortunately, I'm not fond of their UI, it feels cumbersome and difficult to use. When you're using their extension, it is a direct one-to-one sync - meaning that if you delete a bookmark on their server, it will also be deleted in your browser. It is still a beta product, that is still in testing, so perhaps it will improve in the future.

Currently, I'm using delicious.com as my go to social bookmarking site. It's uncomplicated and easy to set up hierarchies of files. It also seems to have a large user base, which is handy in a social service. It's currently my go to and you can see my links here. I have a lot of things for my Comp 2 class, and I'm hoping to put up some of the links we've been using in the perl scripting class as well.

I'll continue to update the blog as I look into other services, and as always I'm open to suggestions in comments.

Follow Up: Google Docs and MLA

A while back I made a post about word processors for students, and I wanted to follow up on that. I also talked about MLA on the web here. We recently did the rough draft of our annotated bibliography for class. I wanted to approach the assignment as a non-technical person might and you can see the results here and here on this blog.

I wrote the piece in Docs, and then downloaded it for use in NeoOffice, the Open Office.org branch that I'm currently using on my Mac. One of the problems I had is that Docs displays output as a continuous stream of paper, and does not show pages unless you use the new print preview feature. While that worked well for a while, it was distracting and when I went beyond five pages the preview broke. I had to guess at the remainder of the formatting.

The downloaded *.ODT file was also messy on formatting, I had to do extensive corrections both in the introduction and in my bibliography. I think I spent almost as long on that as I did for the writing itself. Probably not suitable for beginners.

I also want to talk about publishing. I was able to publish it as a web page through Google Docs, and through the same set of sharing controls, post it here on Blogger. I'm not very satisfied with the results, but I'm not done trying. At the end of this course, I will post my full research paper as I would do it, using all the formatting tools that I know how to use.

With those caveats, I still am a big fan of Google Docs. I like having my documents and spreadsheets available on my desktop, laptop, and school computer in almost every format under the sun. I'm hoping to have more success doing it in reverse order for the final draft. I am going to try two tacks - first created a formatted file on my local word processor and upload it. Second, try doing it with portable document format file (PDF).

I'll keep you updated.

Happy Valentines Day - Or Err Something?

So we're nearly at the big day, Valentines day or the international geek day of mourning. Of course, I'm not doing anything special. Writing perl. Working on this blog. Working on my social book marks for my side project and if I'm very lucky, seeing what Syria has in store for the main character of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. But I don't want to be stingy, or seem bitter - I want to give you a Valentine's day gift. Click the link below.

Violet. 

You're welcome. Violet is a text adventure, or interactive fiction game. This is one of the genres that I grew up playing, and I've never lost my taste for them. Sadly, you will never see them on the shelf at your local EBstop, but on the upside you can find them on the internet for free. An IF game is similar to a book in that it is text-based (any IF game which contains graphics is a heresy and must be purged), and all the action takes place between your ears. Unlike a book, you have to earn the content. Typically IF games are arranged around puzzles or riddles, and this works at two levels. The first level is what do I need to do to solve the current problem, the second is how do phrase that in a manner which the game will understand. Luckily, I'm a nice guy - Violet is a very forgiving game. It reminds you of which problem you're currently working on at the top of the screen and if you type "hint" it will give you a series of clues on how to solve the problem.

The original Infocom games were like novels, and I'm talking high throw weight novels like War and Peace or Ulysses. On your first play through you could easily burn hundreds of hours, if not more. Violet is short, and quite sweet. You could probably play through it in a lunch hour without using the hints.


Violet is also kind of rare (besides being quite a striking young woman, I'll admit that on my first play through I was a little smitten) as it is a romance. So far as I know Plundered Hearts (a pirate romance) by Infocom is the only example of IF in that genre that was released commercially. Before you start getting visions of Fabio or the women that typically grace the covers of romance novels, I'll remind you that this is geek romance - we do things differently here. "I don't think you have the upper body strength to pull that off, budgie" is a parser response in this game.


Which is odd as romance is the single largest fiction genre in American literature. The sales team for the average big five publishing house's romance division is usually larger than all the other divisions combined. I've never believed the common wisdom that female geeks and more specifically female video game fans, are rare. I've met more than a few, some of my fondest memories are of going down to the Treasure Island arcade with my elementary school crush and her father. She demolished me at Pac Man, but I ran Xevious. People make a big deal about women who game, but again, they out number us - the entire "casual" (a term that has gained traction in the gaming world which I detest) genre of games is geared toward women. They are the number one demographic who plays them. My favorite tank, and my favorite DPS (damage per second - a player class who focuses on dealing damage) in World of Warcraft, both were the same woman.


I think the problem is one of perception. I think some people, particularly male gamers, (another obnoxious word, gamer) choose not see how many how many women share their hobby with them. Maybe many women don't feel comfortable discussing their hobby with their friends and family? I think that's what happened with that girl in elementary school, she seemed to love the arcade as much as I did, but I suspect she worried about whether her friends would think it was "cool."


I think geeks are coming up in the world by necessity though. It's been a long slog from the days when brute strength was attraction++, to now when as a survival and income generating attribute intelligence is more heavily weighted. If you want examples, just look at the movies. From back in my day we have John Cusack's roles in Savage Steve Holland's films. A case could be made that he didn't play a geek in Better Off Dead, as he participated in a sport (downhill skiing), but I still say the way the characters acts screams "geek." Matthew Broderick played geeks in both Wargames and Project X. More recently, in Zombieland the romantic lead is a geek. So perhaps there's hope for us yet, but in my specific case, I'll refrain from holding my breath.



I think I've gone on long enough, and my Nintendo DS is calling - so as I've been taking a trip down memory lane, let's go out with a song:









I'll be back on Monday, and we'll have lots to talk about - my experiments with Google Doc for MLA formatted papers, some thoughts on my upcoming research paper, and more. In the meantime feel free to gloat, commiserate or point and laugh in the comments.

Meet the Old Dread Pirate Roberts

Yarr! Me Hardies, Grab a Pint o' Grog an' Sit Down for a Tale of a Pirate's Legacy

I have been wanting to discuss intellectual property law here, but I'm trying to find a way to do it with the dudgeon level turned to something other than "eleven". It is not an easy thing for me. So I have decided I would start by focusing on how I interacted with IP in the past.

Once upon a time, I was a pirate. This was well before the term "pirate" entered common speech in reference to IP - back then a pirate was a guy like Edward Teach or Sir Francis Drake. People pictured the eye patch, the peg leg, the parrot. But I had none of these. I was eight years old, the year was 1982.

I had received my first computer from my parents that year. A brand new Commodore 64, I was pretty lucky, I almost ended up with a Coleco ADAM. I received it so I could improve my hand-eye coordination, my childhood testing showed my as having a problem in that area. I was also to learn how to touch type on it, because my handwriting was terrible. Of course, I quickly discovered the huge catalog of video games available for the C64. I loved Blue Max, Spy Hunter (the C64 version was arguably one of the better ports of this game), Lazy Jones (the most self-referential game ever), and Zork.

I purchased a lot of games. All the Infocom classics, a number of titles by Mastertronic, and quite a few others that I've forgotten. I also joined a user group, and that's where my tenure as a pirate began.

The C64 users group I joined was based around sharing software  piracy. It was a huge group. We met in a church once a month, brought our keyboards, 1541 disk drive and a portable television set and set them up on long tables. Then we'd walk the rows looking at what other people had made copies. Most of the users were around my age and had their parents with them, there was the occasional teenager or adult as well. One of the nice things about the group was that you could get games that were not available at any American retailer. Lazy Jones, for instance, was a product of the British software boom. The American gaming market had just collapsed. No American retailer stocked it, not my local computer shop, not Service Merchandise, or Kmart. But I got a copy at the group. My Dad, my cousin and I would also occasionally get games through friends. One of my friends had a cousin who was part of a pirating group - I forget which one, but I remember his particular moniker. He was Weird Beard the Pirate. It should be noted that Weird Beard wasn't old enough to grow a beard. I think he was about ten years old at this point.

I eventually moved up to MS-DOS around my fourteenth birthday, my first IBM PC was an Amstraad. My Dad got it as a credit card perk from AMEX - but it didn't turn out to be a very good perk. Similar to the Coleco ADAM, it was a complete system. That is, it came with a printer, and the monitor, disk drives and computer were a single unit. It shipped with MS-DOS 3.2, and was not very compatible with most software available for DOS at that time. I think I returned at least one fourth of the software that I purchased, not because I was pirating (retailers were becoming better informed about piracy at this point), but because it would not work on the Amstraad. To give you an impression of how bad this machine was, Sears - one of the few American retailers that stocked it, originally advertised it as a computer. Within two weeks of advertising it they began advertising it as a word processor and cut the price by something like fifty-percent. At this point I was buying more software because copying was getting more difficult. Rights management systems included things like needing to type in a certain word from a page of the manual, or the use of a code wheel to play the game. Additionally some software had code in the program itself to make casual copying difficult.

At first glance, this looks a lot like current rights enforcement systems and that it is working. I have bad news for you if you believe this. Every single technique was defeated rather quickly and those methods filtered down from professional pirates (IE those who sell illegal copies of these programs - this is particularly prevalent in Asia and Eastern Europe today) to hobbyists like me. Yes, at this point I definitely sussed that IP piracy was "wrong."

License keys came next, when you installed a program to your hard disk, you were asked to enter in a long sequence of letters and numbers. If you fail to do it correctly, the program tells you that you're wrong and waits for you to do it properly. There were always rumors that failing to do it correctly would do horrible things to your computer. I've heard people even claim that an incorrect entry could cause your computer to explode. I wish I was kidding. These failed because those codes are generated based on an algorithm. Once someone figures out the algorithm, they can generate "valid" keys all day long. This system combined frequently with a part of the package that "phones home" to the producer's server is mostly where we are today. Ask anybody in the industry, piracy is still rampant despite the use of the "phone home" defense.

I used Napster occasionally when it first released. Napster was great because I found music that I'd never encountered before. I recall one song that was a musical interpretation of a Robert Anton Wilson novel - and it included the author in the production. But this is the point where I gave up my life of piracy and went legit. All of those songs are gone, they died with my old P4 single core.

So why did I give up a life under the good auspices of the Jolly Roger? That's a question media companies ought to be asking, but aren't.

Primarily I gave up piracy for security. Not security against being sued, but computer security. File sharing sites are rife with viruses and malware. I was never infected but the thought was always worrisome. A single song, even priced at CD pricing could cost me a lot of time reinstalling Windows.

Convenience was another factor. Using a p2p like Napster was pretty easy, but it was often difficult to find what you were looking for - of course finding things you did not intend to was often very rewarding. Also assuming you found something you wanted the download took a long time to complete - even if you had a good connection (I was on dial up back then), it didn't mean the other guy did. Frequently the other party would get disconnected in the middle of a transaction, so you might spend an hour downloading and not get the song.

Cost was also a factor. iTunes was less expensive and had a better selection than my local record store. The price was still reasonable, and you didn't have to get a whole CD just to get the one or two songs you actually cared about.

Notice a trend in my reasons? Its all about me. Here's something from the software companies that failed to convince me:



Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. That is horrible. If I were still a pirate, I'd get a billion lashes under the Articles.

The iPad Wrap Up

I needed a little bit of time to collect my thoughts on this and restrain my fanboy-ism. Let me start out by saying that I think it has the potential to be a great device and to be a category killer. The category in question is netbooks. Small, low powered notebook-like devices designed primarily towards web browsing and basic office tasks. These typically have a long battery life. The only place the iPad doesn't beat a netbook is on price, and price competition has typically not been a part of Apple's marketing strategy.

I think iBooks looks very interesting indeed. It is in ePub format, which makes it a game changer. ePub is supported by a lot of different devices - Sony's entire ebook reader line, iPhone OS (using Stanza), Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, in addition to the software available for Mac, Windows and Linux that will handle ePub. I suspect iPhone OS devices are the only ones that will directly sync with iBook, but it should be possible to use other devices by copying the file as you would to a thumb drive. How all of this works out will depend upon how digital rights management is handled with the ePub file, there is no standard for it at the moment which means Publisher A may use a very sensible set of rules, while Publisher B may use DRM that is overly restrictive or hampers the operation of the reading software.

Another nice feature of ePub is that it has been around for a while, and there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable in working with these files. Tools for creating ePub files are abundant and available across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The barriers to being a published author are dropping fast.

When I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had the opportunity to attend a writers workshop as part of my junior year English class. Nothing in the entirety of my academic or professional career did as much to turn me off towards writing as a profession as that workshop. It wasn't criticism that steered me away from writing, it was the business model.

The focus of the workshop really had nothing to do with writing as a craft, it was focused on how to get your work published. They showed off the writers guide and taught us how to read the entries, how to decipher what each publisher required from their submissions, etc. They had published authors describe how they got their book published. Send in your manuscript to somewhere between ten and thirty publishers per day, wait for a response, continue submitting. The average time until publication seemed to be about three years. They also talked a little bit about intellectual property law as it applies to publishing. It is baroque in the extreme. First rights, anthology rights, magazine rights, audio rights, and on and on. It doesn't surprise me that piracy is so rampant. Professional authors and lawyers have difficulty with the subject, how is a layman that has no interest in anything but reading content supposed to know or care about this? I'll save my rights rants for another essay though, you're welcome.

Electronic publishing is by no means a new thing, nor is the ease of access new. In the late 80s I downloaded my first electronic book. This was a few years before I had my first internet account - I got it from a BBS in Clearwater, FL. It was huge, weighing in somewhere around 1.2 megabytes. I think it took about three hours to download. It was the Jargon File, a dictionary of computer terms and geek folklore. These days you can find it here if you're interested. It was created as an ascii text file, browsing through it was slow and ponderous.

The real trouble with eBooks has always been formats. Because no single format has managed to emerge as the standard, there is always the question of "will my device or program read this?", "can I port this to a new device?", "what format should I publish in as an author?" The web itself is a great platform for publication, easy, simple to update, cross platform and available to a wide audience. The two problems with the web as a publication platform are 1) how do I make sure my customers can find my content? and 2) how do I monetize it? The iBook store solves both problems handily.

The iBook store has a large existing customer base on two of the three platforms (sadly, iTunes is not available for linux and I doubt the iBook store will be either), it has search and is organized as customers would expect. A striking difference between it and Apple's App store - but I won't get off on that rant.

The dollar and cents part is still an open question at this point, and a place where publishers can really trip this up. The customer expectation is that eBooks should be less expensive than their physical counterparts. This is not an unreasonable expectation. While eBooks do provide additional utility such as search and annotation, these features are not a selling point for most readers - they are attractive primarily to students and academic professionals. On the value negative side, you do not own a physical thing when you own an ebook, you own a license to use the content. This license if full of incomprehensible legal jargon, but usually the gist of it comes down to the fact that the retailer or the publisher may pull (or deauthorize) the content at any time, and without providing reason or recompense. This is well illustrated by the 1984 debacle on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, see this New York Times article for details. While I believe the resolution provided by Amazon (replacement with a legal edition of 1984 or a refund of the purchase price) was ethical, the readers who had annotated the book lost their work. Additionally, readers are smart enough to know that electronic editions of a book cost a fraction of what a printed edition does to produce. Far too often, the pricing on the ebook edition in Amazon's store is very close or on occasion exceeds the MSRP of the printed edition. Additionally readers know ebooks cannot be loaned, resold or traded. B & N Nook does have a very limited and largely worthless loaning feature. I do not expect to see a similar feature in iBook.

I want to point out this article from A Newbies Guide to Publishing (which I just subscribed to) on the monetary differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing in eBook format. I would like to particularly draw attention to the pricing differences between his works published with Hyperion books (an arm of the Disney media empire) and his self-published works on the Kindle eBook platform. Hyperion is coming in at traditional paperback retail pricing, which runs from $5.99 - $9.99. Looking at it from a retailer's perspective, the numbers on his Hyperion books are not exceptional. No offense intended. Now look at his self-published work. It is sold very cheaply, but the numbers are considerably higher. Simple business 1000 level stuff, but publishers seem to have forgotten it. You can see the same process repeat itself on the iTunes app store. Software priced at the $9.99 or greater mark has few sales, at the $.99 to $1.99 level, lots of sales.

I've wandered a bit from my original topic, and there is a lot more that I want to say about this issue, but I think it is time to wrap this up. I think the iPad will be very successful based on what I've seen. I think the iBook Store will be good for publishers if they can put aside their experiences with more traditional publishing models. I think it will be a boon to small publishers and authors interested in self-publishing. Most importantly of all, I think it will be great for readers.

Live from the Fortress of Ultimate Dorkness

11:40-ish: So I made it back under the wire, and I'm ready to write about the launch. Whatever my theories about the publishing industry, I'm an Apple fan, so this is a pretty exciting day. I'll be updating this post throughout the day. Fair warning, my mouth is still numb and my dentist released mad dogs, crazed wolverines and badgers that flew about with the wings of bats into my mouth less than an hour ago - so I feel that should be taken into account when you read this post. Seriously, he did a great job and I'm thrilled to back in time to write this.

1:00: Getting ready for the start of the event.

1:03: Here we go - Steve Jobs is discussing sales to date on iPods, the Apple retail store, the App store and other miscellany. Make with the sexy tablet already!

1:12: It's called the iPad, is rather pretty (imagine a greatly oversized iPod Touch with a little different UI. It has a dock!

1:42-ish: Yep, The New York Times will have custom app ready for the tablet. Surprise? I guess? Looks the the Times reader will do flash based movies as well. No word on whether iPad Safari will support Flash, but I suspect it won't just like the rest of the iPhone OS family.

1:54-ish: Yep, now we're looking at iBook. Time to perk up your ears and have a shot of coffee. The bookshelf interface looks a great deal like aNobii.

1:58-ish: Introduces the iBook store which has a lot of big publishers behind it: Harper Collins, Hachette, Pengin, Simon Schuster and MacMillan. Works like iTunes and look like it may be ePub based (Apple supports the ePub format) - this is possibly good news. If true it means you can buy product from other stores on the web (so long as they support ePub), or import your own content.

2:00-ish: They've moved on to iWork, Apple's Office suite. Which is pretty nifty - I want to talk more about the book stuff in my wrap up though. I do like the fact that there will be an honest to the Big Whatever word processor available for this thing. That's great, and it's something I miss on my iPod Touch. Now if somebody would just create a port for iPod Touch and maybe a decent text editor - maybe one as good as Text Wrangler . . .


Mostly they've been focusing on presentation type work though, I can see this as being a good device for that.

Steve Jobs is going over the 3g (cellular internet) service available for the iPad. $14.99/mo prepaid for 250mb/month plan or $29.99 for unlimited data through AT&T. Free use of AT&T wi-fi hotspots, no contract required. That's pretty reasonable. The units with 3g capabilities cost $130.00 more though. Pricing without 3g $499.99 for 16gb, $599.99 for 32gb, $699.99 for 64gb. Not bad at all.

Wi-fi only models will be available in sixty days, 3g models will be available in 90 days.

Annnnnnd that's the show, folks. I'll do my wrap up in a separate post later on. See you then.

The Apple Tablet - Publishing's Savior?

So here we are, on the eve of the launch of Apple's tablet. I suspect I'll be missing the launch, and I'm a little bit cross about that. I'll probably be spending some quality time (and a lot of money) at the dentist.

So instead of rejoicing in what will likely be a fine product, let's do a little speculation. The publishing industry seems to betting all in on this product being their saving grace. The paper of record is putting its paywall back up. Yep, as of tomorrow, no more free content for you! Magazines are just as anxious. But I'm wondering if they've really thought this through.

As the industry seems to be committed to making all the mistakes that the music industry made in their struggle with the internet, I believe the best case scenario is that this is what will happen. That Apple's product is successful beyond their wildest dreams, people forget all those silly ideas they had about creating their own content and go back to reading, listening to and consuming someone else's. Worked out alright for the music industry with iTunes, right?

Not so fast. iTunes did do a lot to put the music industry's marker online, but not in the way that they wanted. They went from a very tightly structured oligopoly, an industry where a few large companies dominated the landscape, to having the industry dominated by one man - in the computer industry. Steve Jobs. Last I checked, iTunes was second only to Wal-Mart as a music retailer, so Mr. Jobs could and did get pretty much anything he wanted. Including $.99 per track for a very long time indeed. He also got rid of the publisher's DRM, which was a net good thing. In addition to putting Apple as a huge player in music retail, a lot of artists - major artists got the idea that maybe they didn't need a label. That they could make a lot more money by using the tools available on the internet to bring their work to their fans. Not a short list by any means, it included Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, and Radiohead.

But let's look at the alternative to a successful Apple tablet. What if it's another Newton - which oddly enough helped pave the way for iPhone OS, Apple TV or G4 Cube? I think it's unlikely, but anything is possible. I think iPhone OS is pretty solid, great for people who aren't very computer savvy and has a nice wide range of potential applications even if it's a flop as an eReader. But what if it does turn out to be a dud, what does that mean for Apple and the publishing industry? Apple will shake it off, as it has in the past. We'll see it in the store for a few years and then it will quietly disappear. The consequences for the publishing industry are another matter. Many, like The New York Times have already assumed its success. If it fails, even if they tear the paywall back down, how many customers will have decided that they can find their news and commentary elsewhere?

In either case, how long will it be before authors realize what musicians figured out a long time ago? That publishers need them a great deal more than they need publishers?

Tools for Writers - The Word Processing Edition

Good afternoon everyone, sorry for not posting yesterday, I'm still trying to get comfortable with my new school schedule. In my last post, we talked about text editors and how versatile they are. In terms of this course though, you'll be using a word processor. I love trying new software, seeing how different developers decided to handle my problems as a writer. We are mostly focusing on free apps, but I want to talk about a couple commercial products, so that's where we'll start.

Commercial products

Microsoft Office: You currently have two options for Microsoft Office, Office 2007 or the beta version of Office 2010. What is a beta? A beta is a public software test. Beta software is usually free to use, so if you really like MS Office. There is an upside and a downside to beta software. The good news is that you get to test drive some very expensive software, you'll have an opportunity to see if you like it, and because the company will ask you about what you like and what you don't, you have a chance to make it into a better product. The downside is that beta software is buggy. It crashes, it'll eat your work, or maybe just do strange things to it. If you're interested in the beta you can find it on the Office Online Homepage

Being a student is awesome. No really, everybody wants to sell you something and they often offer you truly absurd discounts. Microsoft does this with MS Office 2007. This is what we use in the classroom, and if you like it, then this is a great thing for you. You can get it for just $59.99 at Microsoft's Student promotion page compare that to the list price of almost $700.00.

This offer can also be found on your MySPC page under student discounts. While certain terms apply, usually the big one for any software purchase is that you have a student email address. So make sure yours is set up.

One thing that is great about MS Word is that it is well suited to doing MLA formatted papers, which we will be doing for class. It has a template for the paper itself and a tool for formatting citations in MLA format. You'll hear this in class when we do our section on MLA but it bears repeating. Don't trust that Word is going to format your citation correctly. Check it and double check it. I'm not putting the onus on Word here, yes I'm a Mac user, but I feel Office is a pretty good product even though it doesn't meet my needs. This goes for any software - whether we're talking about Word or something web based like this.

I think one of the biggest problems that office suites, whether we're talking about Microsoft's product or Open Office.org is that they try to be all things to all people. That's great if you need an application that combines text, graphs and presentation software in one package because you use those things together in your job. But it also adds another layer of complication that you may not need.

A reminder about using Word in class. SPC uses Deep Freeze. That means every night, the machine resets and if you save a document to your computer at school, your work just got deleted. Some classes don't use Deep Freeze, but I would err on the side of caution and expect that they do unless the instructor specifically says otherwise. Even then, backing up your work in a lot of places is a good thing. Put it on your thumb drive, email it to yourself, save it in ANGEL's file storage area. It only takes a few minutes to do that, and if you do it this way your work is safe and available to you from any computer.

iWork: Apple's Office suite. I used this in Comp I for my MLA formatted papers and it did a pretty good job, though if I had to print the paper I had to send it to Word and Word sometimes did odd things to the formatting. You can get a trial of this, which is what I did for Comp I. If you want to own it, you can get it for $40.00 as a student, the list is $80.00. Apple's store page on iWork is here, and you can get to the education store through your MySPC page. iWork is OS X only. I think it is a very good package, when I used it for my papers it was easy to work with the template they provided, and generally easier than Microsoft's version in Word. It did not have the citation tool, but that's not really something that interests me.

I hate spending all this time on OS X software when there are what, three of us Mac users in class including the instructor? But I really want to talk for a moment about something I've used everyday in class since I've started back to school. It was some of the best money I've spent on software since I moved over to OS X.

Circus Ponies Notebook: This is my go to software for note taking, both in class and in real life. Yes, you still have to take notes when you're all grown up. Sorry about that. First, a notebook is something that just about everybody gets, it's a physical artifact that we're all familiar with. The nice thing about notebook is how flexible it is. You can do note taking in pretty much any manner you choose. You can link to sources, include photos, graphs, tables and most anything you could possibly need. I suspect you could do an MLA paper in notebook, though I haven't tried it - I might this term, and if I do, I'll let you know how it works out. As I said, this software is OS X only. You can get it as a download from Circus Ponies and they offer both a trial and a student discount.

Free Software

So that's it for the paid apps. Let's look at the free stuff.

Google Docs: I love Google Docs. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Google fan boy. Google Docs does word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. So think of it as an on the web version of MS Office, with some of the cruft swept away. Docs has a lot of advantages because it doesn't live on your computer, it lives on the internet. First, you can access your docs from any internet connected computer. In addition to being able to type up documents, you can also store documents you've already done and access them on the web. Of course, you can download them in a variety of formats and put the document on whatever computer you happen to be using. This is great if you have a desktop, laptop and a machine you use at school. You can also share them with other people, and let them edit the document or restrict them to viewing it. Multiple people can edit a document at the same time. Obviously, there's potential for abuse here, so I want to be clear - every student needs to do their own work, I'm not suggesting collaboration as a feature in that sense. But there are legitimate uses for this feature.

For instance, one great thing to do with a paper is after you've been through it yourself several times and you're absolutely convinced it is perfect, is to show it to somebody who isn't afraid to bruise your pride a little bit. Because I guarantee you that no matter how good you think it is, there are at least a dozen things you need to correct. Then show it to a few more people. Incidentally, that's why I ask people to comment on this blog. I want to make it better. So please do. The silence is unnerving. So using docs you can share this document with someone you know, even if they're halfway around the world and let them read it. If you let them edit it, they can highlight the parts they feel need changes and comment on why you ought to do that.

It's great for group projects. One problem I have with ANGEL at SPC is that it does not allow collaboration. So what typically happens in a group project is this: you have three or four people and one guy doing the typing or writing. This guy is the one who typically does the lion's share of the work. It shouldn't be this way, everyone should contribute more or less equally. If everybody types, and you can see who typed (or deleted, edited, highlighted what) you don't have to even consider this as a problem. You know who was working and who was slacking. That's a great feature, and one of many that ANGEL should have but doesn't.

Which brings me to another cool word processing trick that can help you when you're doing a paper, whether alone or as part of a group. Revisions. Most word processors track revisions, which are a record of changes to a document. Word can do this. iWork does, and so does Google docs. The nice thing with docs is that you can see who made the changes, as I said above. This allows you to play around with a different wording, or seeing what your paper would look like without this or that paragraph before you make a final decision to keep or cut it.

You can also publish a document to the web. It is indexed by Google and it will come up in a search. This is neat, but I can't see an immediate application for Comp 2, but I figured I would mention it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of user created templates for Docs, which is true of most word processors, but the nice thing with docs is that you aren't downloading anything. Why is that good? Anything you download is a security risk. Any file could be malware or a virus, so if you can avoid putting something on your computer, that's a good thing. Word processing templates are frequently used as a vehicle for virus delivery, so if you aren't using docs, then be cautious about where you get your templates from. Another nice feature that templates has is a rating system. You can see how useful other people found the template, which might save you some time in deciding what to use. They do have an MLA template, and I will make a point to check it out and let you know what I think.

Google docs is free and works in most web browsers, I've used it in IE 7, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Chrome for Mac. Mobile browsers are a little more troublesome, forget about Mobile IE, but Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch works well.

Open Office.org: A free and open source product that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. There are system specific versions of it, like NeoOffice for OS X, that are designed around a particular operating system. It is an office suite containing a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet and a drawing program. I love Open Office, but I do not consider it well suited towards Comp 2. There is no MLA template, though I may look into creating one if I have time. You can get Open Office.org here

Abiword: Abiword is a word processor and nothing else. Like Open Office it is free and open source, and will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. You'll usually find this bundled in lightweight Linux distributions as the default word processor. I've never tried it, but I'll probably take it for a spin and let you know how I like if for Comp 2. You can get Abiword here.

Why do I talk at such lengths about tools? It isn't just because I'm a geek, it is about the nature of work. A student is like any other worker, your work is only going to be as good as the tools you use to produce it. That doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, but you do need to select tools that are appropriate to the job you need to do and that you are comfortable using.

In future installments of this series the tools are going to be a bit more "one off" than what I've talked about so far. Things like scheduling, notebooks (made of dead trees), pencils and pens. Things like that. I hope you'll find it useful and will take a moment to comment. Thank you!